Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 327, Vassals and Porns.

It's been a couple of episodes since we were with John Palio Locos, so let's just recap.

Born in 1332, John was the eldest son of Andronicus III, the active and energetic emperor who led the Byzantines to their last hurrah.

The nine-year-old John would have been aware that the Roman world was under

threat, but he'd have also had a sense of hope for the future. That hope slowly drained away

as he moved from boyhood to manhood. His mother fell out with his father's best friend, John

Cantacuzinos, and a ruinous civil war followed.

Paliolojos showed initiative in forcing his father-in-law into retirement, but once he was in sole charge of the empire, he realized that his inheritance had been fritted away.

Macedonia surrendered to the Serbs, Thrace surrendered to the Turks, the islands

surrendered to the Genoese.

John is criticized in some modern histories for his response. Instead of fighting on the ground in the

Balkans, he left for the West and begged for aid. But John was not wrong in seeing Latin

knights as the only real hope of defeating the Turks.

There was little he could do to forge an Orthodox alliance in the Balkans.

I mean if the Serbians couldn't work with one another, why would they listen to a Roman emperor with no army?

There was interest in the West for a crusade against the Turks, but the various Latin

powers could not work together either. Had the Genoese and Venetians been allies, the Turks

might have been swept from the Aegean, but their deep-seated rivalry made any such project a

non-starter. John returned to Constantinople in 1371 to even more depressing news,

that the Turks had crushed a Serbian army near Adrianople. There was now nothing to stop the

Turks from annexing Thrace as a new province and pushing their armies deeper into the Balkans.

It was only a matter of time before they turned around and put an end to the independence of Constantinople itself.

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